BOTSWANA

Here is the script I intend to send to the 20th Century Fox to challenge Baz Luhrmann's Christmas epic blockbuster: Australia.

A beautiful american school teacher, Claire Ashley (Charlize Theron) flies to Botswana in the mid-eighties to take on her new position in a remote rural school. She is stubborn and passionate, and eager to break from the narrow-minded codes of the zealously religious society she was born in. At the start of the movie, she breaks up with her fiancé (Ralph Fiennes) and tells her mother (Kim Basinger) to go to hell with her bibles and empty preachings. Her father (Robert Redford) is devastated but still gives her his blessing when she leaves.

Once in Botswana, Claire becomes gradually aware of the swamp she put her feet in. The standards of living are so low comparing to her native Alabama that she first thinks about going back there. But soon she meets reverend Parry (Wesley Snipes), a local boy grown into an educated man with refined manners and a perfect command of English. He makes her discover the hidden face of Botswana, with its beautiful landscapes and cheerful inhabitants.
A romance grows between the two and they have sex in the village church. But young school master Eddy Barnes (Steven Waddington ), who got infatuated with Claire, overhears their after-sex conversation.

Jealousy takes the better of Barnes as he can't help spreading out the gossip of their forbidden relationship, while digging into the clergyman's past to find out he got married seven times and had multiple dry-sex intercourses off-marriage. This means he may have caught HIV and then passed it on Claire.
One night, aware of the growing blasphemous rumours, Parry gives Claire his confession about his tempestuous past, but it's too late and the damage is done. A blood test confirms that both Claire and Parry are HIV-positive and worse than that, Claire is now expecting a child who also is in danger of contracting AIDS. She now has to face a couple of dilemnas: can she afford to carry on amazingly good unprotected sex with Parry, bearing in mind that she may let different and potentially more active HIV stem cells enter her body? Can she give birth to a child who is almost certain to die before his sixteenth birthday?

She goes for the romantic choice and pays the price for it. Parry dies in her arms from multiple opportunist infections and she flies back to America with her new-born daughter, wondering whether she will get the support she needs from her family and friends.

Rare animals of Botswana, Part I: the rich guy

The wildlife of Botswana is big and diversified. This landlocked nation in Southern Africa gives shelter to a huge range of nice and helpful species including beetles, grasshopers, flies, mosquitoes, HIV-carrier monkeys and man-charging elephants.
The birdlife is particularily interesting there with its bataillon of green-backed herons and pel's fishing owls that actually interest no one apart from Kalahari-born tour guide Dantes Liebenberg and his starving cat.

Among all this colorful abundance, there are some unlucky under-populated species who must fight for survival on a daily basis. Abandonned by nature, they're too short in numbers to go for group hunting, they're too weak to defend against hungry predators. As a consequence they must hide night and day in their sky-high glass-towers. They can't travel across the land but by using private planes. They have to sit in the back of limousines to skim through the streets of Gaberones, the capital of Botswana.

You know of course who I'm talking about: the rich guy. Even if Botswana ranks pretty well economically by African standards, the rich guy must be on his guard whenever he risks himself out of his only safe spot: the five-star hotels of Phakalane.

As soon as he reaches one of the villages circling the city, he may come face to face with a vicious Bantou speaking the setswana. This deadly encounter cannot be settled by force. American dollars can sometimes do the job, but not always. Sometimes the greedy Bantou, emboldened by the backing of his 76 brothers, asks for more: gold watch, mobile phone, leather shoes... And the rich guy has no other choice than to lay on the floor in a posture of submission. But even that won't always save his life...

That's it for this episode. Coming soon, the next endangered species of Bostwana: the country boy